I’ve noticed that whenever I’ve been sick or just feeling a little under the weather, my actual fatigue can be (much) higher than what my TSS/load‑based metrics suggest. It feels like this kind of “non‑training fatigue” isn’t really captured in the models we use.
When I get back into training my form or fatigue don’t show any warning signs, but I find that I often go too hard, too soon, because I’m so used to following my metrics. Obviously that’s something I should manage better, and in these cases listening to your body is more important than what any number or metric might seem to indicate.
But I’m curious how others handle this. Do you adjust your training readiness manually, use additional metrics, or just go by feel when recovering from illness? Would love to hear how you approach it and what’s worked for you.
Not an athlete or coach, just a cyclist who’s a numbers nerd. I find the best indicator of this kind of fatigue is efficiency (normalized power divided by average HR). This tends to plummet when I’m out of sorts, e.g. with some kind of viral infection. My approach is to stick to shortish Z2 rides, up to an hour or so, until I feel better and/or my efficiency starts to get back to normal.
I use morning HRV/RHR and subjective feel to decide if I just follow the plan or not.
I’m not changing any metrics but once I’m sure that there’s an onset of sickness, I immediately change the weeks plan to only do easy stuff. If things get worse, I skip one or more workouts until things turn back to normal.
The Fitness and Fatigue numbers only capture the activity part of your life. The rest is at least 7-8 times higher in duration.
If you are sick, you should only do low intensity training, if training at all.
Your body need energy, to restore. If you push activities into sickness, you ll prolong your condition. Think like this: If you keep pushing hard during sick days, you can prolong sickness by one week, 2 weeks. Your “hard” effort while sick, sometimes is 50-60% of your healthy effort. You are trading good efforts for mediocre ones. If you do this for one, two days, ok. For a whole week or more, you are trading a few days for a whole week or more of bad training days.
When i’m feeling just a little bad, i do easy rides. If i had a diarrhea before, i dont ride (body is out of fluids). If i feel really bad, i dont ride. I use my feelings to guide me. HRV is a good tool, but if you train hard, your HRV should go crazy, and could be messy if you are in early sickness stage.